These days I’m mainly working with tablet devices including the various flavours of iPad. A year ago there was just the iPad 1 and the iPad 2, but now the 3 and 4 also exist, as well as the mini. Here is a summary:

iPad 1 – Very limited performance and memory. The GPU appears to be around 5-6 times slower than the iPad 2, with the same resolution. Getting a decent frame rate with any kind of non-trivial graphics is challenging, and you can most likely forget about 60Hz.

iPad 2 – This is a very balanced system. Much quicker than the iPad 1, it’s pretty easy to achieve silky-smooth 60Hz with a decent amount of overdraw and alpha blending.

iPad Mini – Almost exactly the same performance as the iPad 2 and the same resolution, just a bit smaller. This device adds no more complications which is nice.

iPad 3 – This is a pr0blematic device. Double the GPU power of the iPad 2, but four times the pixels on to the retina display. Due to everything being alpha blending in our app, the profiler shows the GPU cost to be double that of the iPad 2. This is our limiting device.

iPad 4 – Double the CPU and GPU again. This brings the GPU performance back up to the level of the iPad 2.

The iPad 3 is a bit of a blip. The tiled rendering architecture means that an app predominantly rendered with layers of alpha-blended geomety can expect a 2X performance penalty on the 3. The 3 is actually the limiting system, more so that the 2.

[Aside on the tiled deferred shading if you’re not familiar – The screen is internally divided into a grid, with each grid block made up of some number of actual pixels. For each block, during rendering a list is kept of all geometry that intersects it. At the end of the frame, visibility calculations are done on each pixel, and then only the geometry that contributes to the pixel colour is shaded. Deferring all pixel shading until the end of the frame means that when drawing solid geometry, each pixel only has to be shaded once at the end of the frame, instead of being shaded and then overwritten as more geometry is drawn. However, with alpha blending, all layers contribute to the final pixel colour so all geometry has to be shaded. This negates all performance gains from the tiled deferred shading, hence why alpha blending is bad on iPads and iPhones. Unfortunately, to make nice looking UIs you can’t really get away from it.]